"The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There is no innocence. Either way, you're accountable."
— Arundhati Roy

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Definitions

These are definitions of terms that I use frequently in my writing, provided for your convenience and reference. I have generally written all of these definitions myself, but have drawn some of the ideas in some of the definitions from Julia Bascom, Adam Gluntz, and Shain Neumeier. If a term is missing that you think ought to be defined here, feel free to shoot me an email. (Contact information is in the sidebar.)

Some of these definitions derive from disability theory, whereas others address broader sociological theory and critical pedagogy, and others concern disability politics and policy. If you use these definitions, please cite them. I have taken many of these definitions from the body text of formal papers that I have written.

Under construction. Missing terms that should be here.

Definitions

Able-bodied
People who do not have any physical or sensory disability or mobility impairment.

Ableism
1. Oppression, prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination against disabled people on the basis of actual or presumed disability.
2. The belief that people are superior or inferior, have better quality of life, or have lives more valuable or worth living on the basis of actual or perceived disability.

Accessibility
How well a person with atypical ways of thinking, communicating, sensing, or moving, can easily navigate an environment.

Access needs
The modifications to the typical environment that a person needs in order for that environment to become accessible.

Agency
The ability to make independent decisions and act in one’s own best interests.

Appropriation
The frequently problematic borrowing or theft of specific elements from an oppressed culture in the absence of context, sensitivity, or consent from members of the oppressed culture.

Autism
Autism is a variation on the typical human neurology, or the way that most people’s brains work. It is considered to be a developmental disability.

De-legitimization
1. The use of power and privilege to invalidate the expressions and viewpoints of oppressed people by suggesting that characteristics, whether stereotyped or generally true, of their group impair their ability to be able to adequately understand or respond to discourse about issues that affect them.
2. The use of double standards to claim that an oppressed person is too emotionally invested, personally biased, or incapable of “appropriate” discourse to participate in discourse about issues that affect them.

Disabled
People are disabled when they have physical or mental differences or impairments while living in a society where their bodies and ways of thinking, communicating, sensing, or moving are not treated as “normal” or “natural.”

Erasure
The systematic removal of the viewpoints and existence of oppressed people.
The systematic omission of the identities of oppressed people.

Gaslighting
A form of psychological and emotional abuse in which the abuser actively works to cause the victim to question xir ability to perceive and understand reality.

Horizontal oppression
1. When a member of an oppressed group contributes to the oppression of other members of the same group, such as a sexist woman, a heterosexist lesbian, an ableist autistic person, or a racist black person.
2. When a member of one oppressed group contributes to the oppression of another group, such as a classist black person, a transmysoginistic disabled person, a racist queer person, or an ableist poor person.

Impairment
When someone has difficulty doing something that most other people can do easily. Impairment may lead to disability (such as paraplegia), but does not necessarily (such as nearsightedness).

Indistinguishability
The idea that the goal for disabled people should be to seem as non-disabled as possible, solely for the sake of appearing non-disabled, and even at the expense of necessary and natural means of communicating, moving, or functioning.

Infantilization
When an adult is treated as though they are an infant or a child.

Internalized oppression
Aspects of oppression that an oppressed person believes to be true and will often enforce on other members of the same oppressed community; often co-occurs with self-hatred.

Intersectionality
1. The recognition that a person’s identity is complex and multifaceted, and the result of many distinct aspects, including (but not limited to) gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religion (or lack thereof), class, (dis)ability, nationality, legal status, size, and age.
2. The recognition that social justice theory and work cannot treat individual identities or specific axes of oppression and privilege as isolated, but must recognize the complexity of overlapping identities, oppressions, and privileges.

Invisibly disabled
A person whose disability is not apparent, such as someone with dyslexia, a person with schizophrenia, people with communication disabilities or sensory processing disabilities, or an autistic person.

Marginalization
Systematic erasure and silencing of the viewpoints of oppressed people.

Neurodiversity
1. The belief that differing neurologies are a natural part and form of human diversity.
2. The belief that atypical or divergent neurologies are not indicative of disease, defect, disorder, or illness.
3. The philosophy that neurological difference should be celebrated and accepted as natural and normal.

Neurotypical
People whose brains work in basically the same way as most other people, or whose ways of thinking and processing information are considered more or less “normal” by the standards of their society.

Oppression
1. Systematic disenfranchisement due to actual or presumed membership in a particular group as a result of the power exercised by the analogously privileged group.
2. Some of the most common forms of oppression include ableism, ageism, audism, cissexism, classism, heterosexism, racism, sexism, sizeism, and transmisogyny.

Paternalism
The deprivation of a person's agency by restricting individual freedoms, rights, and responsibilities, often in the name of protecting the victim and frequently by people with privilege and power.

Policy
How people with power or in positions of power have said things are supposed to be.

Power
The ability afforded to privileged people by nature of their privilege to reinforce the systems that give them privileges at the expense of oppressed people.

Practice (Praxis)
How people actually act, especially on a regular basis.

Privilege
1. Often-unearned advantages and benefits in society due to actual or presumed membership in a particular group at the cost of the analogously oppressed group.
- May be benefits that ought to be afforded to all.
- May be advantages or benefits that no one ought to have.
2. Some of the most common forms of privilege include able-bodied privilege, Christian privilege (in most Western contexts), cisgender privilege, class privilege, education privilege, man or masculine privilege (sometimes called male privilege), neurotypical privilege, status privilege, straight privilege, thin privilege, and white privilege.

Restraint
1. The physical, mechanical, or chemical inhibition of an individual's freedom of movement, behavior, or action.
2. Physical restraint is when a person is bodily restrained by other people holding xir limbs, sitting on xem, or otherwise pinning xem against a wall or floor.
3. Mechanical restraint is when a person is strapped, tied, or otherwise bound to another object such as a table or board.
4. Chemical restraint is when a person is forced or manipulated into taking psychotropic medication for the purpose of chemically inducing compliant, passive, and complacent behavior.

Seclusion
A punishment in which the victim is placed alone in a room with a locked or barricaded door and intentionally prevented from leaving voluntarily for a period of time that can last from minutes to hours.

Silencing
1. The use of power to erase oppressed people.
2. The use of psychological abuse to prevent an oppressed person from expressing xirself by causing xem to fear xir own safety.

Theory
Well-structured and examined ideas about how things are and how they ought to be.

Tone-policing
When one person (usually a privileged one) tells another (usually a marginalized one) that xir opinions, ideas, thoughts, and feelings should not be expressed if they are not expressed in a sufficiently polite or civil tone.

Visibly disabled
A person whose disability is externally apparent, such as someone in a wheelchair, a little person, someone with Down syndrome, many Blind people, or someone with cerebral palsy.

Xe, xem, xir
A set of gender-neutral personal pronouns. May be used to anonymize individuals in place of the binarist “he/she,” to fairly safely refer to people whose gender identity and or preferred pronouns are unknown, or to refer to people who do not identify within the gender binary.

4 comments:

I see the term douchebag is suggested as an alternative to ableist language, but d-bag is sexist!! It's sexist because it uses a term associated with women to demean and objectify others, as if women are a low form of life. Could you please remove the term d-bag? Thank you!!

The thing about douchebags is that women don't need them. Think about it: vaginas are beautiful, self-cleaning genitalia. What genius fooled us into thinking we needed to pump caustic chemicals up in there? Consider what douches do to things like pH balance and native microbes -- basically, a douche/bag is an invader that disrupts our natural functioning for no discernible reason other than "someone else is going to think I stiiiiiink!" So why on earth would it demean us to call someone that?

Lydia,I absolutely love your blog. What a fantastic idea; to provide a key to frequently used terms that you employ in your writing. I wish all bloggers were so preemptive. Can't wait to read more!Regards,the Yellow Rabbit

Hi! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I manually approve comments, so sometimes it takes a few weeks, months, or even years to find and approve comments. This delay is normal. (Note that I also don't publish every comment, since this is my personal blog.) Unfortunately, anonymous commenting isn't available anymore since it resulted in over one million spam comments in a short period.

Autistic Hoya strives to be

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I believe in spreading good ideas and helping start critical dialogue. If you want to share (or republish, or teach, or link to, or quote, or talk about) my writing, please feel free to do so as long as (a) you're not making money off of my writing, (b) you do not edit, redact, or censor my writing (excerpts and quotes are fine),(c) you leave my name on whatever you republish or share, (d) you link back to this website or the specific page it came from, and (e) you shoot me an email letting me know where/how you shared my stuff. (If your use of my stuff meets these conditions, you automatically have permission and don't need to ask.) I strongly disprefer fully republished posts, but am not opposed in principle. If you want to share something from this site that I didn't personally write, shoot me an email so I can contact the actual author. If you want to use my writing for any purpose not covered by these conditions (i.e. you will make money off my writing), please ask me and do not assume you have my permission.

Header Image

Photo by Kory Otto-Jacobs, taken March 1st, 2013 in Farragut Square Park, Washington, DC, United States, for the National Day of Mourning vigil for disabled people murdered by family members or caregivers. This is an annual observance that was originally organized by autistic activist Zoe Gross in 2012 following the murder of 22-year-old autistic man George Hodgins by his mother.

This is a cropped, horizontal banner style black and white photograph depicting one of the vigils and its participants (who are of various races, genders, and dis/ability statuses), including Kerima Çevik, Nuri Çevik, Patrick Cokley, Yoshiko Dart, Chad Carson, Linda Finder, Barbara Platt, Taylor C. Hall, and Samantha Bodwell, who is holding a large poster with a photo and the name of Benjamin Barnhard. Lydia Brown (that's me) is in the middle with their back to the viewer. Many participants are holding cameras, video, recorders, or phones. There is an American Sign Language interpreter. This picture shows about 16 people.

Boring legal stuff

Links offsite are not to be construed as endorsement or acceptance of the ideas and opinions expressed therein. Nothing that I have written on any part of this website represents in any way any of the official opinions, beliefs, policies, or platforms of any organization, institution, or entity of any kind with which I am now or have at any time been either formally or informally affiliated or associated, nor is any content from this website endorsed, condoned, or approved by any such organization, institution, or entity except where explicitly stated by such an organization, institution, or entity on its own publication or website. I do not warrant that access to this website and its contents will be uninterrupted or error free, nor do I make any warranty as to the results that may be obtained from the use of this website and its contents, or as to the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or contents of any content, information, material, postings, or posting responses found on this website or any links to other sites made available on the website.

If you need to serve process to me for whatever reason (I hope you're not suing me?), you can email the documents to me as a scanned attachment if your jurisdiction allows electronic service of process, or to request an address or fax number if your jurisdiction does not. I'm in law school; it'll be a practical learning experience (if not exactly the one I want to have).